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About Arno Gourdol

Arno Gourdol leads the Creative Cloud Experience team at Adobe. This team is responsible for building the end to end solutions that allows creatives to discover and fully take advantage of the world class tools and services that are part of Creative Cloud, including CreativeSync, which delivers asset-based workflows that remove friction in the creative process. Arno is a computer science graduate of the Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France and lives in San Francisco.

Every great software platform needs some essential ingredients: one or more programming languages, great tools such as editors, compilers and debuggers, frameworks and libraries that make things easier, an enthusiastic community that help each other out and good documentation that helps get the most of the platform. The web platform is probably the biggest, fastest growing and most ubiquitous platform in the (short) history of computing. And while it has many of these essential elements, there is one that was still lacking: official documentation.

Think about what you do when you have a question about HTML, CSS or JavaScript. There are probably a few sites you trust, a few printed books you keep close at hand, if you’re old-fashioned, but more times than not you just search what’s out there and see what comes up. It could be a well maintained, up to date, credible source, or it could be articles or blog posts that are out of date or just plain wrong.

And the web platform is not static! The browsers keep evolving and implement new functionality, specs keep getting updated, and new specs get proposed and implemented. Best practices evolve as well.

Since there’s no single, definitive resource to go to, there’s no way to know for sure, except through trial and error.

All of that is changing today. The W3C – in collaboration with Adobe, Apple, Facebook, Google, HP, Microsoft, Mozilla, Nokia, and Opera – is announcing the alpha release of Web Platform Docs, a new web destination that will become the definitive resource for all open web technologies. You can find the W3C press release here. The Web Platform Documentation (WPD) will include:

API documentation

Information on browser compatibility

Examples

Status of specifications

And the WPD project will be open and community driven, just like the web. WPD is built on top of MediaWiki, the same engine that powers Wikipedia — which means that anyone can contribute. The initial content is being provided by many of the stewards listed above, but anyone with knowledge, examples, snippets or other relevant information is welcomed and encouraged to contribute.

The stewards have been working incredibly hard on this project for a bit over a year, and I want to congratulate them on the launch today. We are very proud to be participating in this effort. This is the culmination of the effort to build this infrastructure, but in many ways this is also a first step. It is now up to the web community to help create and maintain the most comprehensive and authoritative reference for web technologies. So, go check it out and start contributing. Document the web!

Today, we’re unveiling a new addition to the Digital Media blog, focused on the Web platform. The new blog, called Adobe & The Web, will touch on thought leadership, industry trends and product related announcements from Adobe and partners in the standards and open source Web space. We’ll also touch on commercial tools and service offerings. See our inaugural post below and look for much more to come.

Today in San Francisco, we kicked off Create the Web, a worldwide tour for interactive web designers and developers and partners that will provide us with the opportunity to share our vision for the web. We are delivering a live streamed keynote that lays out our vision for the web and the role that Adobe will play.

Our mission is to make the web better and to build the best tools in the world for web designers and developers.

We contribute to web standards and to open source projects, like WebKit and Cordova, to move the web forward. We get involved in the community, through hackatons and meet-ups. For example, we have worked with the community to organize a series of events called Test The Web Forward. These are a kind of hackatons where we focus on identifying and fixing interoperability problems in the various browsers. We welcome and encourage the participation of anyone interested in joining us.

We are contributing improvements in a few areas where we have some expertise, including magazine-quality layout (CSS Regions & CSS Exclusions), graphical foundation (blend modes, compositing and transforms), better device APIs and cinematic visual effects (CSS custom filters). We are also making available today CSS FilterLab, a fun experiment to play with custom filters, which even allows you to write and debug custom shaders right from your browser.

We also build the tools and services that web designers and developers need. This includes tools like Dreamweaver, our all-in one web production tool. We are releasing today an update to Dreamweaver with support for new HTML5 elements, faster FTP, a streamlined insert panel, support for Edge Animate and more. This update is available for free to Creative Cloud members.

We also introduced today the Edge Tools & Services, which are available with a free membership of Creative Cloud. They include Edge Animate, a powerful tool to create interactive and motion content; Edge Inspect, an indispensable tool to preview, inspect and debug your web content on mobile devices; Edge Code, a code editor for HTML/CSS/JavaScript, available now as a preview and PhoneGap Build, a hosted service to easily build web apps for mobile devices using the PhoneGap framework.

We’ve also introduced Edge Web Fonts, a new service built on the Typekit engine to deliver free and open source fonts.

We’ve given a sneak preview of a new tool we’re working on called Edge Reflow which makes it easy to create responsive web content visually, but using standard CSS and media-queries.

Following San Francisco the tour continues on to London, Tokyo and Sydney in early October followed by a 30-city international tour of “HTML Meetups” in destinations throughout the Americas, Europe, Asia, and more. These “HTML Meetups” are centered on JavaScript, CSS, HTML, designing and developing web content and mobile apps and include a one-hour overview of content from Create the Web and deep dives with demos on our products related to design and development. To request a Meetup in your city, visit http://html.adobe.com/events.

We had a lot of exciting news to tell you about today. To find out more about what we’re doing to make the web better, visit html.adobe.com.